


1:07:06

by heylifeitsemily



Series: Across Dimensions [2]
Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Character death is canon in some dimension, F/M, Got some swears, meant to be Beth's mom, some violence, unresolved endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 03:32:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7918867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heylifeitsemily/pseuds/heylifeitsemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a timeline or two, they never meet, and in a handful more, they never marry. Sometimes, they never get the chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1:07:06

He throws himself into the broom closet and slams the door shut, reasonably sure that the alarms he’d just set off would drown out the sound. If he could just make it until the dipshit guards ran past him, he could double back to the car and –

“ _Ow_.”

Rick now notices that he’d elbowed something fleshy on the way in, and said fleshy thing, obscured in darkness, is apparently not happy with him. There’s a quiet rustling, and then he shields his eyes from a flashlight pointed in his direction.

“Christ, wa – watch where you point that thing,” he splutters, tripping on a bucket and falling against the door.

“Sorry,” they say, without sounding sorry at all. Their knees crack as they stand, lowering the flashlight, and the dull glow gives light to a woman with a black eye already forming. That might be his fault.

“So,” she continues, “what brings you to this particular broom closet on this particular military test base?” Her arms are folded over her chest as she peers at him, sizing him up.

He doesn’t dignify it with a proper response, making a shooing motion towards her and pressing his ear to the door. The footsteps he’s waiting for haven’t gone by yet. It’s silent for another few moments, save for the alarms, and then she starts tapping her foot.

“Could you shut – up?”

“Was I thinking too loudly?” She retorts. The flashlight turns off and he feels rather than sees her lean against the door next to him. The motion sends a vibration through the metal, tingling his cheek. Were their any light in the room, he would be staring directly at her. Instead, he’s met with pitch darkness and no indication that another body is next to him save for the heat radiating off of her.

The alarms blare, and he takes a deep breath, listening.

She smells like sandalwood.

“I can actually hear the gears – gears grinding in your – brain,” he says, barely above a whisper. “It’s been known to happen with less intell – intelligent life forms.”

She snorts, moving back to sit on whatever crate she’d been previously sitting on. He hears another group of guards move past through the metal door, and behind him the sound of her rifling through her satchel. A moment later, a spotted pattern of orange and red light appears on the walls, moving up and down in a rhythmic pattern. It’s oddly similar to that of the stabilizer he’s currently being chased for.

_Fuck._

He pulls out what he now realizes is an exact replica of said stabilizer from his coat pocket, turning towards her slowly. She keeps tossing the real one from hand to hand in a constant arc, back and forth, back and forth. He imagines that the decoy is an identical copy, probably down to the weight and diameter.

Evident from the smirk on her face, she knew _exactly_ what he was doing in this particular broom closet on this particular test base.

The two patterns of light on the wall overlap, the combined radiance a little too bright, and her smirk fades into a sad smile.

She has also, evidently, figured out how this has to end.

In the fraction of a second where she pockets the real stabilizer and pulls a gun, in the moment where she fires it, the door swings open and knocks him out of the way. The fired beam passes him in slow motion, a crackling green. It burns a hole right through the guard’s abdomen.

He collides with the metal shelves, pain erupting through his back, up his spine and through to his fingertips. They make eye contact.

Rick breathes once.  
  
Twice.

The shot doesn’t come.

She fires two more in rapid succession towards the doorway; two thuds echo in the confined space. Her hand shakes as she reaches toward him to help him up, a relieved smile blossoming on her face when he takes it.

“My ship’s on the right side of the base, how close is yours?” She says.

“Closer.”

“Lead the way,” she motions with the gun, and he pulls her through the doorway, still gripping her hand. It’s clammy and cold and fucking gross, and at the same time he doesn’t have any intention of letting go.

A gratuitous number of dead aliens later, they’re sprinting into the docking bay, covered in cerulean blood.

“So what now?” She pants, practically crashing into the side of the ship. Upon inspection he notices that she’d been grazed a couple times in that last hallway, various burns and scratches dotting up and down her arms.

“We go our separate ways, never to see each other again,” he responds, trying and failing to sound less out of breath than she does.

“Oh,” she manages, soft and genuinely surprised. “Okay.” There’s an underlying disappointment to it as she pushes herself off of the ship, brushing hair out of her face. He doesn’t feel guilty about it, definitely does not feel guilty, absolutely does not –

“I’ll see you then,” she says before he can do anything heroic or stupid, switching directions and heading back into the fray.

It makes for a cinematic scene; both hands on her gun, dried blood crusting her boots, and the satchel swinging against his leg as she moves. The satchel holding _his_ stabilizer. He watches her run towards the hangar exit, knows that his aim is good enough to vaporize her from this distance. He cocks his head, calculating.

Bad sportsmanship, he decides. Well, that, and it’s likely she’ll take out another hundred guards when she goes down in a bloodthirsty, zealous blaze of glory.

He’ll swing by in a couple hours, snag the stabilizer, and if by some miracle, she’s alive, he’ll buy her a drink.

* * *

He returns to the base with a fist full of Blipz and Chitz tickets an hour, 7 minutes and 6 seconds later, and is greeted by the sight of two miles of charred metal with a gaping hole where the hangar used to be.

He feels heavy all of a sudden – not heavy, fuzzy, and it situates somewhere in his chest, just behind his rib cage, like his lungs filled with cotton candy from one moment to the next. He ignores it, absentmindedly weaving the ship through debris and waiting to see her corpse float by. Pondering how blue her lips would be.

He docks the ship as best he can in the ruins and rummages around for a breathing apparatus, unsure if he lost it in that poker game with the Yarbethan con artist or if he’d just stashed it under one of the panels in another, equally inebriated manic episode.

It’s at the bottom of a box, engulfing him in the smell of something stale as he straps it on. With a quick once-over, he doesn’t see her yet. Hopefully she didn’t float out into space before he could get back.

He wades through the bodies, some hovering near the ground and brushing against his calves, others closer to eye level in the zero gravity. He bounces from wall to wall, flakes of metal sticking to his hands, the base’s interior already crumbling in the absence of oxygen. He considers the corrosion idly, thinking that the anaerobic environment finally gave whatever sulfate reducing bacteria the Gromflomite’s had crawling around on them a chance to do their thing.

It’s vacuous technical jargon for the sake of distraction, and he lets it carry him through his spacewalk.

The ship starts to creak after another 2 minutes, its structural integrity compromising only a smidge faster than he anticipated. He maneuvers himself to a crouching position against a far wall, pushing off and making a straight shot down the hall.

Dead body. Dead body. Decapitated dead body. Severely burned dead body. Half of a dead body.

The broom closet door comes up on his right, and something tells him that’s where she’ll be. Some would call it fate, or destiny, perhaps, but those people are just hopelessly disillusioned and haven’t yet given up the search for meaning in life. The only things Rick can be certain of are free will, scientific exploration, and his right to abuse the both of them, often simultaneously.

So, whilst barreling towards it, he remembers that the thing was sealed air-tight, with no ventilation. Remembers the details of the room, with his own incredibly observant brain, and then reasons that she’d be able to survive temporarily in such an environment, with his own incredibly precise logic. Destiny can suck it.

Assuming she’d thought that far ahead, assuming she was smart enough to realize its merits in the first place, and assuming she somehow managed to get herself inside before blowing up half the base, Rick determined that the broom closet was the only logical conclusion.

Certainly not wishful thinking.

He catches the door handle as he shoots by, nearly ripping his shoulder out of his socket and a muffled curse falling from his lips. The ship creaks again, but it’s drowned by the sound of his breathing through the filters and the flow of his blood in his ears. Pressing his ear to the door, crossing his fingers in his free hand, he listens.

He hears a gasp, a gasp which sounds suspiciously like the wail of collapsing metal, but fuck it, he’s going for it. Confirmation bias be damned.

He wrenches the door open to find her huddled on the floor, arms wrapped around herself and shivering violently. Her reaction is delayed, eyes moving towards him worryingly slow. Her lips, tinged a faint blue, curve up into a smile.

Eyes fixed on his, she extends a hand and introduces herself in her last breath.

* * *

He portals them to a hospital after performing the second round of chest compressions, deciding that his civil duty doesn’t oblige him to do any more than break a light sweat.

He hands her off to some nurses, signs the necessary forms shoved in his face, and takes a drink. The hospital’s a flurry of movement, overworked and underpaid staff moving this way and that, but the hustle and bustle fades away as he watches them pull out the defibrillator.

“Clear!”

Her body jerks violently upwards, but the heart rate monitor continues its steady long tone, monotonous yet with all the dread of nuclear sirens.

“Clear!”

She jolts.  
  
“Clear!”

He knows a lost cause when he sees one, so he turns on his heel, shoving his hands in his pockets and starting to walk down the hall. He glances down, seeing some blood on his coat, a deep scarlet on his lapel.

“Clear!”

The steady drone of a flat line sounds, echoing across the busy ward and buzzing aggressively in his ears.

He stops mid-step, his hands frozen in the motion of dusting off the lab coat. It was more or less his fault, he thinks, leaving her to fend for herself, however capable she might’ve seemed.

He keeps walking.

**Author's Note:**

> I had an alternate version where she lives, but I couldn't decide what to do with it from there. So, Rick's trademark ambivalence towards death it is. Maybe I'll post an alternate version someday. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please leave feedback and help me become a better writer.


End file.
